Cognitive Biases: Understanding and Mitigating Their Effects

1. Introduction to Cognitive Biases

Every day, people make decisions that affect who gets in, who is hired or promoted, who is punished or rewarded, and what challenges are taken on. People are influenced in these decisions by internally generated signals reflecting the past and predictions about the future. Unfortunately, no one knows whether these feelings are representative, and overwhelmingly these decisions are made in ways that violate basic principles of logical inference (Mohanani et al., 2017). Indeed, people have a variety of cognitive biases that influence the accumulation of evidence for and against their beliefs as well as the weight put on that evidence. Cognitive biases are universal human phenomena. By definition, every human being experiences cognitive biases. If the cognitive bias is of sufficient strength, it will affect that person’s behavior regardless of context or culture. However, this does not necessarily mean that every cognitive bias is not experienced, nor does it mean every cognitive bias is experienced equally by every individual. Any number of factors, including emotional triggers, social support, education, and life experience, can influence cognitive bias susceptibility. Yet in aggregate, cognitive biases have been well studied, and over a hundred distinct effects have been documented with reliable experimental results. Cognitive biases are not surprising; they are side-effects of systems developed through evolution to extract a world model from unreliable, noisy information, stable enough to be useful but flexible enough to accommodate new observations. Because they affect everyone, individually and socially, they are important in every aspect of life. The application of cognitive biases extends well beyond the fields in which they were originally studied. The investigation of how cognitive biases affect the development and maintenance of human technology is both natural and timely.

Keywords: Cognitive Biases